Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Vincent DeCaen <decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca>]

the accents aren't such a big deal, most are variants on a 5-fold
system: disjunctives 0-3 and conjunctives. once you get past the
intimidating list of squiggles, it's not a big deal.

I've noticed nursery rhymes are based on simple prosody, ie, the oral
rhythms of spoken syntax. so one way to explain what's going on is
through, say, Jack and Jill. maqqef is the hyphen --, falling and
rising accents are / \. the brackets mark disjunctives.

  /           \                /              \
(jack   and--jill)      (went--up       the--hill)

      /              \           \                \      \
(to--fetch      a--pail)        ( of )          (waaaa  ter)

phrases have contours. as you come into the home stretch, contour
drops and stretches out, till you hit in effect a pausal water. notice
that in N. American English, the t in water would become a "flap", but
here the second syllable is treated differently and you get a nice
aspirated t.

when you hear the rabbis chant, you get a florid exaggeration of this
basic system.

I hope this helps. the reward for getting into this stuff is learning
how the rabbis understood the text through its reading. but it also
makes a dead text come alive in a special way. I will always remember
the first time I heard the text sung: it was a real experience.

V.
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Vincent DeCaen, Ph.D.                                
<decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca>
Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto

Hebrew Syntax Encoding Initiative
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/~decaen/hsei/intro.html
c/o Deparment of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations
4 Bancroft Ave., 2d floor,  University of Toronto,  Toronto ON,  M5S 1A1

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